In the evolution of the Internet, the term Internet of Things (IoT) has been coined to refer to the unique identifiable physical objects and their virtual representations interconnected in a vast network environment. These virtual representations may also be referred to as the Internet of Everything (IoE) within certain contexts, but there are distinctions between the two concepts. IoE is the networked connection of people, process, data and things. In contrast, IoT involves the networked connections of physical objects and data representations and does not include the people and process components. Hence, IoE comprises multiple dimensions of technology transitions, and may include IoT.
Today, more than 99% of things in the physical world are still not connected to the Internet. As sensor devices and nodes are attached to the Internet, they will generate vast amounts of data that will need to be processed. The amount of data generated will dwarf the already huge amount of Internet traffic generated today. From research predictions, more than 30 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
The current underlying technical approach for processing IoT and/or IoE data is to “store first, analyze later” where all the data from the IoT and/or IoE is processed in the cloud and backend servers at a later time.